Happy
New Year! Have you made any New Year’s
resolutions? I’ll admit, I’ve never been
one to make New Year’s resolution although I greatly admire those who make them
and manage to keep them.
Christmas
here just didn’t feel like Christmas with the weather in the 90’s and 100’s,
but I did manage to do some baking and candy making. I put up a tree and a few decorations and
broke out the Christmas music, but kept expecting Christmas in July car sales
advertisements on TV. In traditional
South African style, the clinic went to half days in December and was closed
for over a week during the holidays.
Many of the businesses here shut down or run minimally during the month
of December, which can be very inconvenient.
We even had difficulty getting our medical supply orders as those
companies also shut down for several weeks.
Thankfully,
everything else is getting back to normal on campus. The students finally finished their exams
about 3 weeks late (due to the protests) and are now home for summer break. They should be arriving back around the end
of the month, but until then, the campus is very quiet. While they’ve been gone, the security gate by
my house has been repaired (it was severely damaged by the student protests) as
has the main university gate.
One goal for the free time I had
during the holidays was to practice my evacuation route into Botswana. I took the opportunity to visit friends in
Lobatse, just across the border, for a weekend and managed to survive the
border crossing with minimal hassle. A
bit different than the US/Canada border!
On arriving at the South African side of the border you park and enter a
building to have your passport stamped and car registration details
recorded. After finishing there you go
through a car inspection and then drive to the Botswana side to go through it
all again. Stand in line, get passport
stamped, stand in line, record car license and registration details, stand in
line, pay a fee, etc. Thankfully, I am now
familiar with the process in case I need to leave South Africa quickly.
The area across
the border is much more beautiful than Mafikeng with rolling hills and lovely
scenery. Sadly, my friends there are
leaving this month to move back to the US so I won’t have a good excuse to
visit in the future.
Please continue
praying for the new student outreaches that will be going on the last week of
Jan and the first week of Feb. Please
pray for open, prepared hearts and willing spirits.
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